A service level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between parties, such as a service provider and a customer. Call centers often use an SLA to specify that a certain number or percentage of calls will be answered within a specified period of time and/or that once a call is answered, the issue will be resolved by a call center agent within a specified period of time. The SLA can also be used as a metric to measure the performance of the call center and its employees. As a result, an agent's compensation can be based, at least in part, on performance relative to terms in the SLA.
Typically, wait times, percentages of times that do and/or that don't meet SLAs, and times to resolve issues are fixed based on, for example, predetermined expected times to resolve various issues. The predetermined expected times can be based on, for example, an average time to resolve various issues. In some cases, an SLA can be adjusted based on a number of callers trying to reach an agent at a call center. In such cases, an estimated wait time can be conveyed to a customer, and this wait time can be adjusted based on the number of callers trying to reach an agent. However, an SLA generally does not adequately take into account the diversity of issues that may be addressed by an agent or time to address specific issues and relay such information to a customer and/or an agent. Furthermore, a customer may call in to or be transferred to an incorrect agent queue. Additionally, or alternatively, a customer can call a call center and initially provide incorrect information to an agent or a system regarding an issue to be resolved. In these cases, an incorrect SLA time may be allocated to an agent. As a result, an agent's performance may be calculated on incorrect metrics and/or an agent may become anxious or try to rush answers to nevertheless meet goals set in the SLA, in order to meet the agent's metrics or compensation goals. Accordingly, improved systems and methods for dynamically updating a service level agreement during a communication are desired.
Any discussion of problems and provided in this section has been included in this disclosure solely for the purposes of providing a context for the present invention, and should not be taken as an admission that any or all of the discussion was known at the time the invention was made.
It will be appreciated that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of illustrated embodiments of the present invention.